On Jan 3, 2005, at 6:18 AM, dhbailey wrote:
Christopher Smith wrote:
Ooh, to the contrary! JW was the leader and chief arranger for a big band before he became the Mr. Lush Film Orchestra Guy we all admire.
And I knew "jives" was a solecism, but I guess I hang out with jazz musicians too much. It rolls off my tongue more easily than a sailing term. 8-)
Which big band?
The first I ever heard of him was as the composer of the music for Lost In Space, where he was called Johnny Williams. Hardly jivin' music!
His dad was a jazz drummer (with the Raymond Scott group), he studied jazz piano and worked as a jazz pianist in New york. and for the rest I quote here from
http://www.filmtracks.com/composers/williams.shtml
which mentions leading and writing for Service bands in the early 50's, and in the second paragraph writing for jazz and dance groups when his career was getting started in the late 50's. He is the pianist playing that distinctive left-hand riff in the main theme of Peter Gunn (by Henry Mancini.) I was certain I had seen a reference to the Johnny Williams Big Band somewhere, but I'm not finding it. Maybe that particular group was his dad's, who has the same name.
If this quote shows up as coloured text as it does on my machine, try selecting it to make it more legible. I can't seem to figure out how to get rid of the dark background colour in the quoted passage. Sorry.
Drafted in 1952, Williams was assigned to the United States Air Force, and as a part of his tour of duty he conducted and arranged music for service bands. After his discharge in 1954, he spent a year at the Julliard School of Music as a piano student of Rosina Lhevinne. During his stay in New York he worked at various nightclubs as a jazz pianist. Later he was accompanist and conductor for singer Vic Damone, played for composer Alfred Newman at Twentieth Century-Fox, and was engaged as a pianist with Morris Stoloff's Columbia Pictures staff orchestra in Hollywood, of which his father was then a member. His talent for orchestration was soon recognized and encouraged by the studio composers. Meanwhile, he continued his serious music studies in Hollywood with Arthur Olaf Anderson and with the noted Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.
Beginning with his first screen credit, for Because They're Young in 1960, Williams' career as a composer of film scores gathered steady momentum. Prized for his versatility, he wrote music for jazz combos, dance bands, and symphony ensembles. Beginning on the late 1950's, Williams was also involved in television. He appeared as a jazz pianist in the Detective series Johnny Staccato, and he both composed and conducted for such shows as "M-Squad", "Wagon Train", and "Chrysler Theatre". In 1974, a young Steven Spielberg came to John Williams after being moved by his score to The Rievers to score his new movie, Sugarland Express. After his string of highly popular disaster film scores for The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, Black Sunday, and The Fury, critical notice of the scores, although often perfunctory in film reviewing, at times recognized the music's important contribution of the success of the films. Recognition also came through the Academy Award nominations (over 35 to date) he garnered for music he wrote or arranged, including those for several songs in the 1960's.
Christopher
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